he succumbed.

But he would not run for office. He had trouble every spring
persuading her, but he always did persuade her, that this wasn't his
year, that conditions were wrong, and that next year probably would be
better. But he allowed her to call their home "The Bivouac," and have
the name cut in stone letters on the horse-block; and he sat by meekly
for many long years at lodges, at church entertainments, at high
school commencement exercises, at public gatherings of every sort, and
heard her sing a medley of American patriotic songs which wound up
with the song that made him famous. It was five drinks in Jake Dolan
that stopped the medley, when the drinks aforesaid inspired him to
rise grandly from his chair at the front of the hall at an
installation of officers of Henry Schnitzler Post of the Grand Army,
and stalk majestically out of the room, while the singing was in
progress, saying as he turned back at the door, before thumping
heavily down the stairs, "Well, I'm getting pretty damn tired of
that!" Mrs. McHurdie insisted that Watts should whip Dolan, and it is
possible that at home that night Watts did smite his breast and shake
his head fiercely, for in the morning the neighbours saw Mrs. McHurdie
walk to the gate with him, talking earnestly and holding his arm as if
to restrain him; moreover, when Watts had turned the corner of Lincoln
Avenue and had disappeared into Main Street, she hurried over to the
Culpeppers' to have the colonel warn Dolan that Watts was a dangerous
man. But when Dolan, sober, walked into the harness shop that
afternoon to apologize, the little harness maker came down the aisle
of saddles in his shop blinking over his spectacles and with his hand
to his mouth to strangle a smile, and before Dolan could speak, Watts
said, "So am I--Jake Dolan--so am I; but if you ever do that again,
I'll have to kill you."

It happened in the middle eighties--maybe a year before the college
was opened--maybe a year after, though Gabriel Carnine, talking of it
some twenty years later, insists that it happened two years after the
opening of the college. But no one ever has mentioned the matter to
Watts, so the exact date may not be recorded, though it is an
important date in the uses of this narrative, as will be seen later.
All agree--the colonel, the general, Dolan, Fernald, and perhaps two
dozen old soldiers who were at the railroad station waiting for the
train to take them to the National Encampme